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Front MatterSource: International Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 4, Dissolving Boundaries (Dec., 2003), pp. i-ivPublished by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3186387 .Accessed: 23/10/2013 17:49

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DISSOLVING BOUNDARIES Dissolving Boundaries: Introduction Suzanne Werner

David Davis and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

I. THE SECOND IMAGE REVERSED ... AND REVERSED AGAIN

Reintegrating the Subdisciplines of International and Compara- Bruce Russett tive Politics

The Impact of External Threat on States and Domestic Societies Manus I. Midlarsky Globalization, Democratization, and the Prospects for Civil War in T David Mason the New Millennium

Where Do the Peacekeepers Go? Michael Gilligan and Stephen John Stedman

Development and War Douglas Lemke

Imposing Sanctions: States, Firms, T. Clifton Morgan and Economic Coercion and Navin A. Bapat

II. A THEORY OF CONFLICT?

International Relations Theory and Internal Conflict: Insights David A. Lake from the Interstices

Mediation and Foreign Policy Saadia Touval

Inside and Out: Peacekeeping and the Duration of Peace after Virginia Page Fortna Civil and Interstate Wars

Mediation and Peacekeeping in a Random Walk Model of Civil Alastair Smith and Interstate War and Allan Stam

Explaining the Intractability of Territorial Conflict Barbara F. Walter

0) Blackwell Publishing Publshedfor he Iterntionl StdiesAssoiatin byBlacwellPublshin


EDITORS Margaret Hermann Global Affairs Institute Maxwell School, Syracuse University Syracuse, New York 13244

ASSISTANT EDITOR Binnur Ozkececi-Taner [email protected]

Robert Woyach The Leadership Academy 5135 Pebble Lane Columbus, Ohio 43220

ADVISORY BOARD (AT SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY) William Banks International Law Mehrzad Boroujerdi Political Science Stuart Brown International Relations Program John Burdick Anthropology Linda Carty African-American Studies Fiona Chew Media and Communications

Eric Kingson Demographics and Aging Louis Kriesberg Sociology Mary Lovely Economics Anne Mosher Geography Brian Mullen Psychology J. David Richardson Economics Karin Rosemblatt History

Robert Rubenstein Analysis and Resolution of Conflict Mark Rupert Political Science Larry Schroeder Public Administration Susan Wadley South Asia Center

EDITORIAL BOARD Alice Ackermann G. C. Marshall Center Jefferson Adams Sarah Lawrence College Valerie Assetto Colorado State University Mark Boyer University of Connecticut Robin Brown University of Leeds Michael Cox London School of Economics Peter Dombrowski Naval War College A. Cooper Drury University of Missouri Kevin Dunn Hobart and William Smith College Yale Ferguson Rutgers University

Joshua Goldstein American University Vicki Golich California State University-San Marcos B. Welling Hall Earlham College Martin Heisler University of Maryland .Patrick James University of Missouri Christopher Joyner Georgetown University Joyce Kaufman Whittier College Charles Kegley University of South Carolina Sai Felicia Krishna- Hensel Auburn University Stephanie Lawson University of East Anglia

Donna Lee University of Nottingham James Lehning University of Utah Jack Levy Rutgers University Marianne Marchand University of Amsterdam Donald Munton University of Northern British Columbia Jan Aart Scholte University of Warwick G. Paul Sharp University of Minnesota/ Duluth Bengt Sundelius Uppsala University Thomas Volgy University of Arizona Antje Wiener Queens University


International Studies Review Volume 5 Number 4 December 2003

Special Issue

DISSOLVING BOUNDARIES

This special issue of the International Studies Review is part of the International Studies Association's Presidential Series; each issue in this series elaborates on the theme of an annual meeting. This special issue reflects the theme of the 2001 annual meeting held in New Orleans, Louisiana, March 24-27 titled "Dissolving Boundaries: The Nexus Between Comparative Politics and International Relations." The issue will be simultaneously published as a book by the same title by Blackwell Publishing with the ISBN# 1-4051-2134-3.

Editors Suzanne Werner, David Davis, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita


Dissolving Boundaries

Contents

Dissolving Boundaries: Introduction SUZANNE WERNER, DAVID DAVIS, and BRUCE BUENO de MESQUITA 1

I. The Second Image Reversed ... and Reversed Again

Reintegrating the Subdisciplines of International and Comparative Politics BRUCE RUSSETT 9

The Impact of External Threat on States and Domestic Societies MANUS I. MIDLARSKY 13

Globalization, Democratization, and the Prospects for Civil War in the New Millennium

T. DAVID MASON 19

Where Do the Peacekeepers Go? MICHAEL GILLIGAN and STEPHEN JOHN STEDMAN 37

Development and War DOUGLAS LEMKE 55

Imposing Sanctions: States, Firms, and Economic Coercion T. CLIFTON MORGAN and NAVIN A. BAPAT 65

II. A Theory of Conflict?

International Relations Theory and Internal Conflict: Insights from the Interstices

DAVID A. LAKE 81

Mediation and Foreign Policy SAADIA TOUVAL 91

Inside and Out: Peacekeeping and the Duration of Peace after Civil and Interstate Wars

VIRGINIA PAGE FORTNA 97

Mediation and Peacekeeping in a Random Walk Model of Civil and Interstate War

ALASTAIR SMITH and ALLAN STAM 115

Explaining the Intractability of Territorial Conflict BARBARA F. WALTER 137


THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW (ISSN 1521-9488) is published four times a year, in March, June, September and December by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., with offices at 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and PO Box 1354, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK. Call US (800) 835-6770 or (781) 388-8200, UK +44 1865 778315; fax US (781) 388- 8232, UK +44 1865 471775; e-mail US [email protected], UK customerservices@ oxon.blackwellpublishing.com. Visit us online at www.blackwellpublishing.com. Subscription also includes four issues of International Studies Quarterly and four issues of International Studies Perspectives.

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? 2003 International Studies Association


Dissolving Boundaries: IntroductionAuthor(s): Suzanne Werner, David Davis and Bruce Bueno de MesquitaSource: International Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 4, Dissolving Boundaries (Dec., 2003), pp. 1-7Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3186388 .Accessed: 23/10/2013 17:49


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International Studies Review (2003) 5(4), 1-7

Dissolving Boundaries: Introduction

SUZANNE WERNER

Department of Political Science, Emory University

DAVID DAVIS

Department of Political Science, Emory University

and

BRUCE BUENO DE MESQUITA Hoover Institution, Stanford University and Department of Politics, New York University

The traditional boundaries drawn between comparative politics and international relations are dissolving. With only a few exceptions, international relations scholars acknowledge that "domestic politics matter" and matter much. Comparative politics scholars likewise recognize with increasing regularity that international politics influences relations within states.

In this volume, we consider whether and the extent to which boundaries between the two fields are and should be dissolving. Although the boundaries between international political economy and comparative political economy are perhaps even more fluid, we focus here on issues related to domestic and international security and conflict. While this orientation reflects the editors' own interests and expertise, the focus on conflict and security issues also represents a particularly hard case for the dissolution of boundaries between the subfields as conflict has traditionally been viewed as high politics and the least likely to be affected by domestic politics (in the case of international security issues) or by international politics (in the case of domestic security issues).

This work is divided into two broad parts. In the first part, we explore the relatively uncontroversial notions that domestic variables affect issues of international security and that international variables can affect issues of domestic security. There are articles that focus on theoretical concerns and trends in the field as well as those that consider specific instances of linkages across the subfields via either empirical or formal methods. In the second part of the work, we explore the more controversial notion that international and comparative politics are linked not only because conditions in one environment affect events in the other, but also because it is possible to use a single theoretical framework to understand domestic and international security issues. Once again there are articles that lay out some of the key issues and those that use a single theoretical framework to understand a particular security issue.

In this introduction, we will provide an overview of the work and make the case for a true dissolution of boundaries between the subfields. We maintain that the boundaries are obsolete not only because domestic politics affects international politics and vice versa, but also because we believe that the fields can be unified under a single theoretical framework that focuses attention on political leaders as

? 2003 International Studies Review. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.


2 Dissolving Boundaries: Introduction

actors interested in attaining and maintaining themselves in power while subject to institutional and other political constraints.

The Second Image Reversed ... and Reversed Again From our perspective, it is unsurprising and uncontroversial to expect that domestic conditions influence international politics or that international conditions influence domestic politics. We assume (as we discuss in greater detail below) that state leaders are strategic actors whose primary motivation is to stay in power. Because both domestic and international challengers can threaten their tenure, every decision leaders make must balance domestic imperatives with international constraints. Leaders in different domestic institutional settings or facing different types of domestic challengers will behave differently in the international arena. Similarly, leaders who occupy different positions in the international system or face more or less severe foreign threats will behave differently in the domestic arena. A leader will always be cognizant of the challenger, either domestic or foreign, that poses the greatest threat.

More difficult is to go beyond merely asserting that domestic and international politics influence one another to determine the complicated causal pathways by which each domain affects the other. Within international relations, the empirical connection between democracy and peace, for example, is well established. Recent scholarship in this area has focused on exactly how regime type may influence behavior by considering among other things the motivations of the leader as the size of the winning coalition and selectorate changes (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999, 2003), the effects of a democrat's greater sensitivity to costs (Filson and Werner forthcoming), or the consequences of greater transparency within democracies (Schultz 1999). On the other side of the divide in comparative politics, it is widely accepted that globalization can affect domestic stability. Recent scholarship expands on this linkage by investigating how globalization can affect such diverse areas as the organizational ability of social movements, the flexibility of government policy both to respond in ways that accommodate societal demands or to repress those demands, and the distributional consequences of economic growth or stagnation. Determining the causal linkages between the subfields is further complicated by the fact that the direction of influence is rarely one-way. Democracy affects peace but peace can also affect democracy. Development affects the likelihood of war but war also affects the prospects for development. These complicated endogeneity issues only further reinforce the interconnections between international relations and comparative politics and enhance the need to eliminate the barriers between the subfields.

In this work, several scholars address the causal connections between domestic politics and international conflict and between international relations and domestic stability. Bruce Russett provides an overview of developments within these domains and numerous examples to illustrate how each can inform the other. He also persuasively argues that the division between international relations and comparative politics that we have taken as a given is really a product of a particular period in history (post-World War II) and the theoretical paradigms that dominated that time. Two distinct subfields are appropriate if one sees state leaders as so constrained by the international system that they have little foreign policy discretion or if one sees domestic politics as simply a product of the aggregation of the interests of various interest groups. The great political philosophers did not recognize the division we now take for granted.

While Russett focuses primarily on the effects that domestic political institutions have on international conflict, Manus Midlarsky turns the causal arrow around in his article. He maintains that state leaders often respond to an insecure external environment by turning against their own citizens. Insecurity abroad can threaten


SUZANNE WERNER ET AL. 3

democracy at home. In the aftermath of September 11 and the resulting growing sense of international insecurity, Midlarsky warns of dire domestic consequences that may result from the state's attempts to protect itself.

In his article, David Mason similarly considers international influences on domestic politics. He draws on an extensive body of literature to explore the ways that changing conditions in the international system affect the future prospects of civil war. He argues that multiple systemic changes-such as increasing globalization, spreading democratization, and enhanced international involvement in domestic affairs-are altering not only the incentives of minority groups to challenge the government but also the government's incentives to retaliate with force. He shows that the effects, particularly of globalization, are often contra- dictory. While globalization can enhance a domestic challenger's ability to mobilize and, thereby, increase the potential for civil conflict, globalization can also ensure that the government's response is placed under an international microscope and, in turn, can lead to a reduction in the potential for civil conflict.

Michael Gilligan and Stephen Stedman provide a nice follow-up to Mason's analysis by examining where peacekeepers are sent when civil conflicts emerge. The international community may be more involved since the end of the Cold War, as Mason argues, but for some countries gaining the attention of the international community is harder than for others. Gilligan and Stedman demonstrate, on the one hand, that peacekeepers are uniformly more likely to be sent as the costs of the conflict increase. On the other hand, they demonstrate that certain regions, like Europe, are far more likely to receive help than others. Surprisingly, Asia, not Africa, is the least likely region to receive peacekeepers when civil conflicts occur. Significantly, their analysis encourages us to rethink our ability to make broad statements about the effects of changing systemic conditions on domestic politics. As they show, changing systemic conditions, like international oversight, may not affect all regions equally.

The article by Douglas Lemke pursues this last point even further. He points out that the empirical evidence increasingly demonstrates that relationships linking such important correlates of conflict as power and regime-type are not uniform across all regions. Lemke maintains that a certain level of economic and political development is a prerequisite for a state to participate in international relations as typically envisioned. Many so-called states are so politically underdeveloped that to assume that they have a monopoly on the instruments of coercion within their territory is truly heroic. In these areas, leaders envision security threats almost exclusively in terms of domestic, not international, threats to power. In fact, the government's ability to respond to these threats helps to create a state that exists in more than name only (Tilly 1975). To the extent that theories of international interaction lead us to expect different patterns of behavior as a function of political and economic development, it is important that we take into account different stages of political and economic development in our empirical analyses. Lemke also provocatively suggests that "controlling for" development may ultimately be inadequate. Regions may appear to act differently, not because there is a need for a "new theory" for each region of the world, but because the relevant political actors may differ depending on their stage of development. In Europe, states are the most relevant actors. In some regions of Africa, in contrast, nonstate actors may have far more control and power over certain territories than the state itself. To truly evaluate international relations in certain regions of the world, it may be necessary to extend our analyses beyond simply relations between states.

Although the article by Clifton Morgan and Navin Bapat differs substantively from some of the other articles as it deals with economic rather than military conflict, these authors also make a case for the unavoidable linkages between domestic and international policies. Like Lemke, they maintain that an exclusive focus on states as international actors is too narrow. In their analysis of economic



sanctions, they reconceptualize the strategic interaction as a game between the sender country that is trying to influence the policy of a target country via economic sanctions and the firms within that sender country. State leaders cannot simply choose whether or not a target state is sanctioned. Instead, the state leader can adopt a sanctions policy, but the implementation of that policy depends on whether the firms in the country choose to abide by the policy and curtail their business with the target country or not. The success of a government's foreign policy decision to sanction another state depends very much on their ability to influence domestic economic actors. Morgan and Bapat suggest that in an era when domestic firms can increasingly relocate their production facilities or make use of subsidiaries in other countries, firms may increasingly be independent actors that determine whether or not government attempts at coercion are successful.

The articles in this part of the work cover a wide range of topics and highlight the numerous and complicated linkages between domestic and international politics. Whether one is dealing with economic sanctions, civil unrest, or interstate war, it is difficult to envision an explanation that does not cross the boundaries between the subfields.

A Theory of Conflict? Given the overwhelming empirical evidence, we find it difficult to challenge the notion that domestic politics affects international relations and vice versa. More controversial is the idea that a single theoretical framework can be devised to study both international politics and comparative politics. Such a notion assumes fundamentally that there are no significant differences between the international and domestic realms and, more specifically, with respect to issues related to conflict, that there are no fundamental differences between interstate and civil conflicts. Any differences are better viewed as differences in degree and not fundamentally in kind.

For many, such arguments are considered heretical since most of us internalized in the very first years of graduate school the notion that the international realm is fundamentally different from the domestic realm because the international system is anarchic while the domestic realm is hierarchic (Waltz 1979). Assuming this fundamental difference between the international and domestic systems has led to a similarly stark difference in the theoretical orientations of the two fields. International scholars think about security dilemmas and commitment problems; comparative scholars think about laws and institutions.

David Lake's article in this volume challenges this differentiation. Anarchy or hierarchy are not exogenous conditions but are instead the result of decisions and choices made by the relevant actors in the system. In some instances of civil conflict, groups choose to work within the rules of the system while in other cases they may choose to challenge the state and the hierarchy it represents. Thus, anarchy is possible in any state; a hierarchy exists only so long as the groups within allow it to exist and consent to its terms. If the potential for anarchy shadows all of domestic politics, then the supposed consequences of anarchy are equally applicable to domestic politics as well. Similarly, if there are differences between the international and domestic realms, the source of these differences cannot be found within anarchy itself since anarchy shadows all relationships to some degree.

If the supposed a priori distinction between comparative and international politics is more apparent than real, how might one approach the study of conflict generally? Saadia Touval's article provides some important guidance for respond- ing to this question. In his critique of the mediation literature, he argues that existing studies fail to consider mediation from a political perspective. He argues that mediation, like other foreign policy decisions, must be seen as purposive



strategic behavior or in Schelling's (1963:4) words, "behavior motivated by a conscious calculation of advantage." Echoing the strategic perspective summarized in Bueno de Mesquita's (2003) textbook, Principles of International Politics, Touval argues that leaders make decisions (in this specific example regarding mediation) to advance their own ends. As a result, their decisions are going to reflect international constraints and objectives as well as domestic constraints and objectives. The leader in this perspective is the key actor balancing between the demands of domestic groups and the needs and demands of international groups. All foreign policy decisions--indeed, all political decisions-are best understood as a reflection of the leader's interests and the domestic and international constraints he or she faces. Within the specific example of mediation, Touval argues that the strategies and techniques chosen by mediators may in some instances have little to do with the actions that best facilitate the end of the conflict and much to do with the actions that best serve some ulterior or political motive of the mediator. This strategic perspective provides a solid foundation from which we can approach the study of both domestic and international conflict. Whether making decisions regarding domestic issues that must take into account international politics or making decisions regarding international politics that must take into account domestic politics, the leader and that person's desire to maintain power is a common starting point for any analysis regardless of whether the decision involves domestic or international politics.

Conceptualizing war as a bargaining failure, as Lake does in his article, also provides an extremely useful and unifying way to approach the study of conflict (see Fearon 1995). The bargaining perspective conceptualizes war as a costly outside option, like going to court if one is in a legal dispute or going on strike if one is involved in labor negotiations. Since wars (or trials or strikes) are costly, there should exist bargains or negotiated agreements that both sides prefer to this costly option. Understanding why wars occur then is equivalent to understanding why negotiations fail. As Lake explains in greater detail, divisibility problems, problems arising from private information and incentives to misrepre- sent, and enforcement problems are typically identified as the key culprits that impede negotiations despite the disputants' strong incentives to reach an agreement.

Significantly, this approach suggests that there are no fundamental differences between the causes of civil conflicts--whether motivated by ethnic or ideological differences-and the causes of interstate conflicts. States sometimes fight when they are unable to negotiate a settlement to divide up a piece of valuable territory. Similarly, governments and rebels sometimes fight when they cannot strike a deal as to how to share power. Of course, one may argue that certain problems are more acute in one domain than in another, as Barbara Walter (2002) has done with regard to enforcement dilemmas and the termination of civil conflicts when compared to interstate conflicts. The causal processes driving conflict, however, are fundamentally similar--differences of degree and not of kind. Significantly, such a conceptualization of conflict not only has the potential to unify our study of civil and interstate conflict but also the ability to unify conflict studies with such diverse fields as litigation and capital-labor relations.

The contributions by Page Fortna, Barbara Walter, and Alastair Smith and Allan Stam offer evidence that a single theoretical logic can provide significant leverage on diverse questions across many different arenas. In her article, Fortna examines the durability of peace settlements after both interstate and civil wars. She argues that in both arenas, the inability of the belligerents to credibly promise to implement the terms of the agreement and maintain the ceasefire threatens the peace. The enforcement problem is not isolated to the international arena but is a general problem with which all belligerents struggle. She goes on to demonstrate empirically that the terms of the agreement, or the institutions put in place at the



time of the ceasefire, can significantly improve the odds that the peace endures. Institutions matter both between and within states.

Walter is interested in the conditions in which governments will choose to make concessions to minority groups to avoid violence. She maintains that private information regarding the government's willingness to fight can hamper negotiations because the government may have an incentive to create a reputation for toughness so as to prevent future challenges from other minority groups. Her empirical analysis shows that governments are less willing to accommodate minority groups when there are other minority groups that may challenge in the future. Although in a one-shot deal governments have a large incentive to avoid the costs of war by being accommodating, they may be willing to pay those costs if the game is going to be repeated. While her application deals specifically with civil conflicts, the analysis generalizes easily to the international realm. As Walter indicates, the argument applies equally well to territorial disputes between neighboring states. To deter future challenges, states that face numerous outstanding territorial disputes may be less likely to accommodate and more likely to invest in a reputation for toughness than states with few neighbors who might challenge them in the future.

Smith and Stam take private information as their point of departure as well as they try to understand the duration of conflict. For them, war is caused by private information and the inability of the disputants to credibly reveal that information. Significantly, the war itself provides the information that makes it possible for the belligerents to reach a settlement (see also Wagner 2000; Filson and Werner 2002; Powell 2002; Slantchev forthcoming). They use this basic framework to analyze the conditions under which third parties can hasten the end of fighting. As they argue, their analysis is equally applicable to civil and international conflicts and the role third parties can play in these conflicts. Provocatively, their model suggests that third party mediation is unlikely to be successful. Third parties that are clearly biased toward either side cannot credibly reveal information but neither can supposedly neutral third parties. So long as the third party prefers peace to war, the belligerents will question whether the information the third party imparts is true rather than a product of the third party's desire for peace. In contrast, third party peacekeeping has a greater chance of success. Although third parties cannot effectively resolve the information problems that caused the war, by standing between the belligerents they can increase the costs of fighting sufficiently to encourage the belligerents to accept a broader range of settlements.

Although each of these authors is addressing a different issue-the durability of peace agreements, the onset of conflict, the role of third parties in conflict management-they share a common conceptualization of war as a bargaining failure. Their analyses are not specific to interstate or civil conflict but, instead, focus on the commitment or informational problems that prevent the belligerents from peacefully resolving their dispute whether those belligerents are two states, two different ethnic groups, or a government and a domestic challenger.

Conclusion This work covers a lot of ground. Although the articles are diverse, they are held together by a common belief that theoretical advances in the study of conflict are most likely to occur at the interstices of comparative and international politics. We do not expect that the boundaries between these two subfields will soon dissolve completely, but we do expect that international relations scholars will increasingly delve into the arena of comparative politics and that comparative scholars will increasingly be forced to become savvy about international politics. As scholars cross boundaries, we expect that theories and methods will too. Ultimately, we expect a theory of conflict to emerge that equally incorporates international constraints and domestic imperatives.



References BUENO DE MESQUITA, BRUCE. (2003) Principles of International Politics: People's Power; Preferences, and

Perceptions. New York: Congressional Quarterly Books. BUENO DE MESQUITA, BRUCE, JAMES D. MORROW, RANDOLPH M. SIVERSON, AND ALASTAIR SMITH.

(1999) An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace. American Political Science Review 93:791-808.

BUENO DE MESQUITA, BRUCE, ALASTAIR SMITH, RANDOLPH M. SIVERSON, AND JAMES D. MORROW. (2003) The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

FEARON, JAMES. (1995) Rationalist Explanations for War. International Organization 49:379-414. FILSON, DARREN, AND SUZANNE WERNER. (2002) A Bargaining Model of War and Peace: Anticipating

the Onset, Duration, and Outcome of War. American Journal of Political Science 46:819-838. FILSON, DARREN, AND SUZANNE WERNER. (Forthcoming) Bargaining and Fighting: The Impact of

Regime Type on War Onset, Duration, and Outcomes. American Journal of Political Science. POWELL, ROBERT (2002) Bargaining Theory and International Conflict. Annual Review of Political

Science 5:1-30. SCHELLING, THOMAS C. (1963) The Strategy of Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press. SCHULTZ, KENNETH. (1999) Do Democratic Institutions Constrain or Inform? Contrasting Two

Institutional Perspectives on Democracy and War. International Organization 53:322-366. SLANTCHEV, BRANISLOV. (Forthcoming) The Principle of Convergence in Wartime Negotiations.

American Political Science Review. TILLY, CHARLES. (1975) Reflections on the History of European State Making. In The Formation of

National States in Western Europe, edited by Charles Tilly. Princeton: Princeton University Press. WAGNER, R. HARRISON. (2000) Bargaining and War. American Journal of Political Science 44:469-484. WALTER, BARBARA F. (2002) Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars. Princeton:

Princeton University Press. WALTZ, KENNETH. (1979) Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.


Reintegrating the Subdisciplines of International and Comparative PoliticsAuthor(s): Bruce RussettSource: International Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 4, Dissolving Boundaries (Dec., 2003), pp. 9-12Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3186389 .Accessed: 23/10/2013 17:50


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PART I

Reintegrating the Subdisciplines of International and Comparative Politics

BRUCE RUSSETT Department of Political Science, Yale University

Long before academic disciplines and subdisciplines emerged, the great writers on politics understood well how the fields of knowledge that we call international relations and comparative politics informed each other. The Greeks did not make a distinction between the two. Indeed, Thucydides, often regarded as the first great analyst of international relations, is centrally concerned with domestic politics. He considers how Athens' direct democracy encouraged quick and ill-considered decisions for war, and how failures in war, in turn, undermined that democracy. Although he does not offer contemporary-style generalizations about the international behavior of different regime types, his narrative is devoted to the details of leadership and debates on decision making. His famous statement, "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta" (Thucydides 1972:1:23), is ambiguous. As a Greek of his day, Thucydides might well have believed in inevitability. But was it an avoidable fear that made the Peloponnesian War inevitable, or did the fear inevitably follow from the growth of Athenian power? If Thucydides means the latter, his reputation as a realist is fully deserved. His extraordinary concern with the effect of democratic politics, however, suggests something more complex.'

Similarly, the second-image reversed is evident in Aristotle's premier text of comparative politics: The Politics. Aristotle sees oligarchies as derived from warriors and is well aware of the role of external intervention and defeat or victory in war in inducing constitutional change. One could go on with similar concerns in most of the canon, notably in Machiavelli's and Rousseau's writings. Hobbes was actually a theorist of the state, and Leviathan would likely fall into the contemporary box of comparative politics; application of his theories to international relations is essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. Of course, Kant's theory provides an elaborate structure of interactions among domestic systems, wars, and alliances.

Despite the rich precedent established by the great writers in politics, the study of international relations remains a distinct focus of analysis in that the security dilemma of self-help in a system of sovereign states conditions any effort to import propositions from comparative politics, which recognizes within most states a greater role for the monopolization of legitimate violence than characterizes the international system. In the shift of late twentieth-century enthusiasm away from

'Doyle (1997:Ch. 1) contends that Thucydides does not regard the full chain as inevitable but regarded both individuals and domestic structure as intervening. Kagan (1969:chapter 20) argues strongly that Thucydides does intend the full chain of inevitability, but that he was mistaken in doing so: that the war "was not caused by impersonal forces," but "by men who made bad decisions in difficult circumstances," and that neither "the circumstances nor the decisions were inevitable" (Kagan 1969:356). Woodruff (1993:xxx-xxxii) reads Thucydides as saying that the Athenians were engaged in "elaborate self-deceptions" about inevitability or necessity.

? 2003 International Studies Review. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.


10 Reintegrating the Subdisciplines of International and Comparative Politics

classical realism (for example, Morgenthau 1949) to Waltz's (1979) neorealism, domestic politics was relegated to a minor role (more than in Waltz 1959), with cruder variants characterizing states as bumping billiard balls of identical internal composition. Some noted works of comparative politics, in turn, regard the evolution of national governments as largely path-dependent from previous domestic experience, with little role for peaceful influences from abroad.2 Yet on both sides of the international relations (IR)/comparative divide, intellectual developments of the past decade have poked great holes in the boundary dividing the subfields and led to a wide exchange of ideas and movement away from excessive parsimony in both views. Neither can still be passed off as a bounded subdiscipline.

Increasingly, we regard states' behavior in the international system as deriving from a combination of constraints and incentives that are both endogenous and exogenous to the state. Interest has shifted away from such pure IR systemic measures of power as bipolarity and multipolarity. This trend, of course, reflects the passing of Cold War bipolarity, but it also reflects the widespread empirical experience that it is unrewarding to look for consistent patterns of conflict intensity that are affected in any regular or simple way by the systemic distribution of power. The emergence of possible unipolarity in the present system has kept systemic models alive but without much historical referent from which to make persuasive empirical statements.

A promising theoretical turn over the past decade has been from systemic or purely state-level influences to dyadic behavior, and more recently to directed dyads (which state does what). This turn makes it very clear that relative power matters-and matters a great deal. Other inducements or constraints also matter, however. It seems to make a great difference-both for the avoidance of violence and for active cooperation in international economic institutions (Mansfield, Milner, and Rosendorff 2002)-how the state is internally constructed and how each state with which it is interacting is so constructed. So far the major payoff from this turn seems to come from the distinction between autocracies and democracies, but further research is likely to extend and refine that payoff with finer theoretically informed distinctions.

Robert Putnam's (1988) early bridge of two-level games has been followed by much game theoretic work on strategic interactions. This work demonstrates that leaders' policy preferences often vary according to whether their domestic political institutions force them to satisfy a broad coalition of supporters or a narrower set of those who can keep them in power or eject them from it. Importantly, this perspective applies both to international behavior and to the relative pursuit of private and public goods domestically with consequent effects on economic growth (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003). Diversionary wars are alleged to arise from the efforts of leaders whose grip on power is at risk because of domestic dissatisfaction or conflict, and, in turn, that possibility may affect the willingness of their external adversaries to provide a pretext for conflict initiation (Smith 1996).

Not only does the type of domestic regime matter systematically, so too do transnational commercial ties and ties attributable to common membership in international organizations. Indeed, all these so-called liberal variables make a difference, as do such realist variables as power and perhaps alliances (Russett and Oneal 2001). Economic ties matter because they enhance the political role of groups with interests at stake in maintaining peaceful relations with other countries in general, and with particular other countries. Not only can these groups exert greater influence at home, but they can also become players in the political system

2This is true even of Huntington (1991:270-279), who famously crosses the IR/comparative boundary. His list of six conditions favoring the consolidation of new democracies identifies only one that is external.


BRUCE RUSSETT 11

of their country's trading partners. International organizations also matter because they strengthen the role of nonstate actors in domestic politics as well as creating common interests between certain governmental institutions in both countries. International organizations also make a systematic contribution to successful transitions to democracy and to the consolidation of newly democratic regimes (Pevehouse 2002; and note Kant's idea of a mutually supporting confederation of republics). Democracies are more likely to cooperate with one another. Both transitions to democracy and the stability of new democracies are strongly affected by processes of international diffusion, especially from neighbors (Gleditsch 2002; Starr and Lindborg 2003). All these illustrate processes of IR/comparative feedback.

Another example of the connection between international relations and comparative politics is the role of international institutions in promoting economic development. Not long ago it was common to ask simply whether aid from, for example, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, was correlated with subsequent economic growth in recipients of that aid. But doing so ignored problems that in retrospect seem obvious: the international institutions, to enhance their own credibility, have an interest in aiding states that have the prerequisites for growth, and governments more committed to growth may be more likely to seek external assistance. Therefore, an apparent correlation between aid and growth may be spurious-the consequence of selection effects that may reflect the character of domestic regimes and their interest in growth (perhaps at the expense of economic equality). When selection effects are taken into account, the relation between aid and economic conditions turns out to be much less beneficial than might otherwise have been thought (Vreeland 2002). This kind of work fundamentally cuts across the comparative/IR boundary in terms of theory, institutions, variables, methods, and data.

Further evidence of the artificiality of boundaries between comparative politics and international relations shows up in the emerging literature on civil wars. Civil wars violate the standard comparative politics characterization of the state as a monopolist with respect to the instruments of violence; sometimes the breakdown of this monopoly approximates the anarchy of the international system, even in that system's more violent phases. Moreover, in such circumstances the state's legal boundaries break down. Defining what constitutes national territory is part of the process of building identity for a national state, and it can promote or reduce conflict with nearby states. Partly for this reason, civil wars often have serious contagion effects, drawing in neighbors and often lengthening the war (Elbadawi and Sambanis 2001). Just as regime type matters to the likelihood of international conflict, the lack of democracy is likely to exacerbate ethnic conflicts because out-of- power minorities have little leverage to redress their grievances (Gurr 2000). Civil wars may be least likely to occur in democratic states, and most likely in states that are weakly authoritarian--not democratic, but not dictatorial enough to be able to repress internal conflict effectively (Hegre et al. 2001). Stable and institutionalized settlements of civil wars are most likely to arise from political reform, elections, and democratization. And-to complete the IR/comparative loop-a civil peace is more likely to stick if the peace agreement is bolstered by a multidimensional and multilateral peace-building operation that goes beyond military intervention and provides economic reconstruction and reform of political institutions (Doyle and Sambanis 2000).

An explosion of accessible and increasingly refined data, breakthroughs in statistical analysis, the shock of changes in the world, and major theoretical improvements have combined synergistically to offer a greater possibility for big advances in understanding comparative politics and international relations than ever before. Comparative politics scholars created many of the data sets now used in international relations research, including all the measures of domestic regime type. The Correlates of War Project, for instance, never showed any interest in


12 Reintegrating the Subdisciplines of International and Comparative Politics

compiling that information. Both subfields have had to address similar specification problems for pooled data sets varying across time and space and for the management of selection effects. One cannot even begin to explain the end of the Cold War without understanding changes in both the international distribution of power and institutional crises within the formerly Communist countries, and without constructing new theoretical models that combine those influences.

All these advances cannot be merely linear within each subdiscipline; they must be integrating as well, as each subdiscipline enriches the other. Just as feedback loops exist between domestic and international politics in the world, feedback loops exist between the scholars who try to understand them.

References BUENO DE MESQUITA, BRUCE, ALASTAIR SMITH, RANDOLPH M. SIVERSON, AND JAMES MORROW. (2003)

The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOYLE, MICHAEL. (1997) Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism. New York: W.W.

Norton. DOYLE, MICHAEL, AND NICHOLAS SAMBANIS. (2000) International Peacebuilding: A Theoretical and

Quantitative Analysis. American Political Science Review 94:779-802. ELBADAWI, IBRAHIM, AND NICHOLAS SAMBANIS. (2001) How Much War Will We See: Estimating the

Prevalence of Civil War in 161 Countries, 1960-1999. Journal of Conflict Resolution 46:307-334. GLEDITSCH, KRISTIAN. (2002) All International Politics Is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration, and

Democratization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. GURR, TED ROBERT. (2000) Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century. Washington, DC:

United States Institute of Peace Press. HEGRE, HAVARD, TANYA ELLIGSEN, SCOTT GATES, AND NILS PETTER GLEDITSCH. (2001) Toward a

Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816-1992. American Political Science Review 95:33-48.

HUNTINGTON, SAMUEL P (1991) The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

KAGAN, DONALD. (1969) The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. MANSFIELD, EDWARD, HELEN MILNER, AND B. PETER ROSENDORFF. (2002) Why Democracies Cooperate

More: Electoral Control and International Trade Agreements. International Organization 56: 477-513.

MORGENTHAU, HANS J. (1949) Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf. PEVEHOUSE, JON. (2002) Democracy from Outside-In? International Organizations and Democratiza-

tion. International Organization 56:515-549. PUTNAM, ROBERT. (1988) Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games.

International Organization 42:427-460. RUSSETT, BRUCE, AND JOHN R. ONEAL. (2001) Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and

International Organizations. New York: W.W. Norton. SMITH, ALASTAIR. (1996) Diversionary Foreign Policy in Democratic Systems. International Studies

Quarterly 40:133-153. STARR, HARVEY, AND CHRISTINA LINDBORG. (2003) Democratic Dominoes Revisited: The Hazards of

Governmental Transitions, 1974-96. Journal of Conflict Resolution 47:490-519. THUCYDIDES. (1972) History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. Harmondsworth:

Penguin. VREELAND, JAMES. (2002) The IMFand Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. WALTZ, KENNETH. (1959) Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia

University Press. WALTz, KENNETH. (1979) Theory of International Relations. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. WOODRUFF, PAUL. (1993) On Justice, Power and Human Nature: Selections from the History of the

Peloponnesian War. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.


The Impact of External Threat on States and Domestic SocietiesAuthor(s): Manus I. MidlarskySource: International Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 4, Dissolving Boundaries (Dec., 2003), pp. 13-18Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3186390 .Accessed: 23/10/2013 17:50


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The Impact of External Threat on States and Domestic Societies'

MANUS I. MIDLARSKY Department of Political Science, Rutgers University

I begin with the premise, amply validated, that liberal democracy is the best form of government for the avoidance of ethnic conflict. And by ethnic conflict, I mean violence to persons or property committed by members of one ethnic group against those of another, or by the state (often controlled by an ethnic majority) against members of any ethnic minority. Events occurring in the international arena that negatively influence democratic governance also can increase the probability of ethnic conflict. State security, which frequently is highly dependent on the state's immediate environment, is critically important in the maintenance of liberal democracy.

Democracy and State Security The concept of state security has been at the core of international relations (IR) theorizing, at least in the post-World War II period, if not earlier. The security dilemma as developed by Robert Jervis (1978) and Jack Snyder (1985), of course, has been at the heart of IR theory, as has the related concept of threat in Stephen Walt's (1987) transformation of the balance of power into the balance of threat. But in most IR applications, state security was deemed a function of interstate relations, without necessarily having an impact on either the state itself or on domestic societies. Quantitative analyses of arms races were exemplars of this interstate emphasis.

Several years ago I found that state security had an impact on the inner workings of the state itself, particularly on the extent of its democratic governance. Diminished state security is associated with less democracy cross-nationally, and with the overthrow of democracy in favor of autocratic government (Midlarsky 1995, 1998, 2002). These findings are related to the "reversal of the causal arrow" in democratic peace theory suggested by me, and others such as William Thompson (1996) and Patrick James and his colleagues (1999). Of course, the causal arrow can go both ways, but the reversal was put forward to suggest principally that the democratic peace is not a unidirectional phenomenon.

In these studies, the state is the principal focus or dependent variable. Elements of its international environment threaten the state, and changes then occur in its modus operandi. But the state is not the only potential target of external threat. Societies also can be threatened in the form of events emanating from the international environment that can undermine the norms, values, and even the very foundations of civilizations as perceived by their residents. Here I refer to the mass murder and even genocides of populations who, rightly or wrongly, are perceived as uniquely threatening. One cannot begin to understand the genesis of

'An earlier version of this chapter was presented on the Roundtable titled "Using IR Theory to Understand Ethnic Conflict: Insightful or Irrelevant" at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, March 23-27, 2002.

? 2003 International Studies Review. Publishedby Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.


14 The Impact of External Threat on States and Domestic Societies

the Holocaust or the more recent Rwandan genocide without taking into account the impact of events external to the societies in question. The rise of Communism in Russia and its export temporarily to Bavaria at the end of World War I was nothing less than traumatic to Bavarians such as Heinrich Himmler, later to be Reichsfiihrer-SS and an architect of the "Final Solution." Hitler himself, of course, was deeply affected by the emergence of Bolshevism in the heart of Europe that required troops of the German government to defeat. The presence of three Russian-Jewish emissaries at the head of this Bolshevik regime suggested that the traditional conservative Roman Catholic Bavarian way-of-life was to be utterly transformed. Germans in other parts of the country felt equally threatened. In other words, not only the state was subject to political transformation, but the structure and ordering of society was likely to be changed beyond recognition (Midlarsky forthcoming).

Although the perception of threat was palpable, the reality of the deep patriotism of German Jews during World War I belied this perception. The reality consisted of 100,000 Jewish men under arms (80,000 having served in combat), 12,000 Jewish dead at the front, and 35,000 decorated for battlefield bravery. These statistics are out of all proportion to the roughly 500,000 Jewish citizens living in Germany in 1914 (Fischer 1998:120). Such a disparity between reality and perception is suggestive of the immense impact that external threat can have on domestic political life.

In Rwanda, the threatened return of traditional Tutsi domination over the Hutu majority fed the genocidal fury of 1994. Military victories of the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front invading from Uganda and concessions to the Tutsi during the Arusha negotiations made a renewed domination possible, even likely. The deaths of 500,000-800,000 people were a consequence of this perception.

A Continuum of External Threat These considerations suggest that we can construct a continuum of external threat magnitude in relation to its impact on state and society. At one end we find threats confined principally to the state itself, which can result in state transformations but do not necessarily have much impact on the daily lives of people. This minimal impact tends to occur in ethnically homogeneous societies. The demise of democracy in response to various external threats in Eastern Europe during the interwar period is a case in point (Midlarsky 2002). In a relatively homogeneous country such as Estonia, the transition to autocracy had little impact on peoples' daily lives, whereas in more ethnically mixed Poland, individual citizens gradually came to be more affected.

As the external threat to Poland became more severe, the tendency toward authoritarianism was more pronounced, and the lives of ordinary citizens were more deeply affected. The Polish case illustrates this transition across the threat continuum. Radicalization and its impact on ethnic minorities occur as a consequence of increased external threat, especially when legitimized by the relevant international community.

In Poland, this transition began with the Locarno Pact of October 1925. Although hailed in the West as a milestone in the consolidation of peace because it gained German recognition of the inviolability of Germany's western borders as prescribed in the Treaty of Versailles, in the East it encouraged quite the opposite reaction. Instead of a direct international guarantee of Polish borders, Locarno obtained a French guarantee of these borders, but only within the framework of the Covenant of the League of Nations. In other words, France could act only after the cumbersome League machinery had been put into motion, thereby delaying any international assistance until it was probably too late to do any good. Thus, the Franco-Polish alliance that had served as the principal bulwark of Polish territorial


MANUS I. MIDLARSKY 15

integrity since 1921 had been diluted almost to the point of uselessness. At least this was the conclusion reached by the Polish General Staff and communicated to the Polish ambassador in Paris in February 1926 (Gieysztor et al. 1979:566-567). Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, repeatedly announced that Locarno did not limit Germany's right to obtain "corrections" to her eastern border (Cienciala and Komarnicki 1984:273).

Two additional factors were to compound the insecurity. The Soviet-German Neutrality Pact of April 1926 appeared to be explicitly directed against Poland (Leslie et al. 1980:158). German troops had occupied Poland during World War I, and the Polish-Soviet war had ended only five years earlier. Hans von Seeckt, commander of the German army, was known to hate Poland and sought her destruction (Lukowski and Zawadzki 2001:210). To avoid the limitations of the Treaty of Versailles, German troops actually began secretly training on Soviet soil; it would have been virtually impossible to conceal such military maneuvers from the Poles. Second, in 1925, Germany began a tariff war with Poland that compounded her economic difficulties. An internal economic insecurity was thereby added to the military uncertainty, principally because half of Poland's trade was with Germany (Lukowski and Zawadzki 2001:209).

In May 1926, Marshal J6zef Pilsudski, hero of the Polish-Soviet war, overthrew the democratically elected government, significantly retaining the positions of minister of war and general inspector of the armed forces, after appointing trusted colleagues to civilian posts (Lukowski and Zawadzki 2001:213). Initially, Pilsudski announced that the coup would have no revolutionary consequences for the polity or society (Gieysztor et al. 1979:579), which was largely true during the first years of his regime.

Despite Pilsudski's desire to avoid antagonizing ethnic minorities and thereby to keep Poland's borders intact, majority-minority relations gradually deteriorated as the state aggregated authority to itself. The election of the Sejm (parliament) in 1930, characterized by electoral manipulation and other measures, returned a clear majority for a broad coalition of Pilsudski 's supporters (Leslie et al. 1980:176). At the same time, in response to Ukrainian nationalist provocations, the infamous "pacification of Eastern Little Poland" occurred, in which the rural population was terrorized by the army as it was billeted locally and carried out its investigations. Abandoned Orthodox churches were blown up, and sporadic attempts to convert the Orthodox to Roman Catholicism occurred. In 1934, a Polish version of the Nazi concentration camp (called an "isolation camp") was constructed to house Communists as well as members of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian opposition to Polish rule (Gieysztor et al. 1979:585-593).

As the second largest minority in Poland after the Ukrainians (Vital 1999:763), the Jews also would not fare well as power was aggregated by the state, partly in response to the substantially increased threat on its western border after the rise of Hitler. In 1935, a new constitution was introduced, which endowed the president with enormous powers, simultaneously reducing the powers of the Sejm. Upon Pilsudski's death in that year, the gradually deteriorating condition of Polish Jews worsened considerably. As early as September 1934, J6sef Beck, the Polish secretary of foreign affairs declared to the League of Nations that Poland was not required to safeguard the rights of its minorities. Further, Jews would have to emigrate to places like Madagascar to reduce urban overcrowding. The increasingly common identification of Jews with Communism, although vastly exaggerated if not downright false, nevertheless increased the Polish Roman Catholic perception of threat emanating from the Soviet Union.

Within one month of Pilsudski's death, in June 1935 a massacre of Jews took place in Grodno. The following year witnessed intermittent pogroms throughout Poland that continued until the war broke out (Dubnov 1973:880-881). Jewish university students were forced either to attend lectures seated in separate benches



set aside for them or to stand, which the vast majority chose to do. Only the onset of World War II prevented explicitly anti-Jewish legislation from being passed in the Sejm (Vital 1999:772). Poland was on the verge of either ethnic cleansing its Jews or excluding its Jewish minority from public life.

International legitimation of "corrections" to the German border by the Locarno Pact set the entire process in motion that would be strongly intensified by the rise of aggressive irredentism in the Nazi regime. Thus, when the initial threatening agent becomes radicalized, so too does the potential victim, which in turn can victimize its own population. Members of victimized minorities also may turn against each other, as did many in Poland just prior to World War II.

At the extreme end of the threat continuum, the rise of ideologies such as Bolshevism and its polar response, Nazism, had a tremendous impact. An impend- ing threat to patterns of daily living can have enormous consequences, even giving rise to a competing totalitarian ideology like Nazism. Observers such as the Papal Nuncio in Munich, Eugenio Pacelli, later to be Pope Pius XII, would be affected to the extent that support of Nazi anti-Bolshevism would become Vatican policy during World War II (Phayer 2000).

Between these extremes of the continuum lie many other behaviors in which both state and society can be affected. Permeability or penetrability of state boundaries is a key variable. Even highly secure states have permeable boundaries. One has only to recall the impact of the oil embargoes of 1973 and 1979 on US citizens. Earlier, the rise of McCarthyism in response to the European and Asian spread of Communism had a strongly deleterious effect on US policy. The purging of East Asian specialists from the State Department in response to Senator McCarthy's threats had much to do with the absence of sorely needed professional advice at the time of the US intervention in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. Loss of professional expertise at the level of policy formation had a profound impact, as did the loss of jobs and careers to those people most intimately affected by McCarthyism.

Impact on Liberal Democracy and Its Diffusion The attacks of September 11 on the United States have threatened to take a toll on the civil liberties associated with liberal democracy. Initial anti-Muslim and anti- Arab sentiments were sometimes expressed in violent acts. Efforts of the Bush administration to keep the prosecution of suspected terrorists out of the civilian court system, characterized by its many civil rights protections, is a case of the potential impact of security concerns on basic elements of liberal democracy. Thus far, the impact of September 11 on both the US state and society has not been substantial, largely because it was a single event whose consequences have been, for the most part, successfully contained. But if future attacks occur, then serious limitations on civil rights could be imposed in the name of national security. If the source of these new attacks also was to be Al-Qaeda, then anti-Muslim or anti-Arab hostility could be renewed. Ethnic conflict within the United States might increase.

When faced with extreme threat, substitution in state leadership of democracies is not uncommon. Winston Churchill, whose political career appeared to be waning, found himself propelled into the office of prime minister at the start of World War II. Ariel Sharon, a virtually unthinkable candidate for the Israeli prime minister's office prior to the onset of Intifada II and suicide bombing, easily defeated the less bellicose candidate, Ehud Barak. Sharon recently was reelected by a large majority. Personnel occupying important roles within the structure of political authority can experience radical change and a consequent introduction of new policies. But the rule of law in Israeli society itself thus far has not experienced much change except for some curtailment of civil liberties for suspected terrorists, as in the United States after September 11. However, if a weapon of mass


MANUS I. MIDLARSKY 17

destruction were to be used by terrorists, then civil liberties even in a mature democracy could be diminished to the point of liberal democracy's end. The now widely quoted aphorism, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact," succinctly indicates the primacy of state security.

All this suggests that a theory of external threat is necessary for understanding many domestic behaviors, including ethnic conflict, both at the state and societal levels. Our current literature is sufficient to take on this theory-building task. But is it also possible that a more benign external environment can affect the democratization of societies? Here I refer to the literature on the diffusion of democracy (Huntington 1991; Starr 1991). Regional patterns can have a positive impact. Thus the external threat continuum could be extended to the impact of democracies on the development of democracy and human rights in neighboring countries. A continuum of this sort, of course, assumes that a single dimension exists, stretching from the malign effects of threat to the benign effects of democracy. Do these processes constitute a single dimension, or are they multidimensional? Because this question as yet remains unanswered, I propose that the theory underlying the threat continuum be investigated first, followed by any extensions in benign directions.

Given the critical importance of liberal democracy for the avoidance of ethnic conflict, the events of September 11 have mandated the precedence of threat in any such research program. How democracies can cope successfully with terror attacks on their civilian populations has, of course, become a major issue. A criterion of success is not only the elimination of the terrorist threat, but also the maintenance of liberal democracy in all its many human rights dimensions.

Threat Mitigation An emphasis on threat leads inevitably to an investigation of threat mitigation. How can threat be lessened or countered so that liberal democracy can thrive and ethnic conflict be minimized? Great powers have weapons of mass destruction that can effectively counter external threat, at least that emanating from competing states, but much also can be learned from the behavior of small powers. During the interwar period, two landlocked countries, Austria and Czechoslovakia, behaved in very different ways. Czechoslovakia, recognizing its geopolitical vulnerability, sought alliances with many powers both large and small. Austria was much less active in alliance seeking; only when the state appeared to be terminally threatened did the Austrian leadership seriously seek external help (Midlarsky 2002). Czechoslovakia survived as a democracy virtually until the start of World War II; Austria did not. Even when other factors are taken into account, alliance behavior proved to be critical in differentiating between the two countries.

Alliances are a potent vehicle for the mitigation of external threat. Even superpowers such as the United States can profit from alliance activity. Not only is the international perception of great power influence enhanced, but the greater the number of allies, the smaller the amount of available territory for terrorist training facilities or safe havens. Exchange of information also is facilitated by a large number of allies. Toward the end of the Cold War, the United States was far more successful in its alliance activity than the Soviet Union. The same one-sided outcome appears to be developing in the current battle against terrorism.

Conclusion

Finally, the successful countering or mitigation of threat by a democracy can lead to the international furtherance of democracy. Democracy then appears to be ascendant in its competition with other "isms" and so is to be emulated. This, of course, is a benign outcome because ethnic conflict would likely also be diminished



in extent and severity, at least in the long run after democracies mature. Thus, success in the minimization of threat on that end of the continuum can lead to the diffusion of democracy with its positive outcomes on the benign end. Much is at stake for democracy and ethnic conflict in the current war against terrorism. But the same can be said about the high stakes for democracy in the cold and hot wars of the last century. Democracy has fared reasonably well thus far and likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

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Globalization, Democratization, and the Prospects for Civil War in the New MillenniumAuthor(s): T. David MasonSource: International Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 4, Dissolving Boundaries (Dec., 2003), pp. 19-35Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3186391 .Accessed: 23/10/2013 17:50


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Globalization, Democratization, and the Prospects for Civil War

in the New Millennium

T. DAVID MASON

Department of Political Science, University of North Texas

The last half of the twentieth century was marked by dramatic changes in the patterns of armed conflict in the world. First, whereas wars between sovereign nation-states had defined the contours of international politics for the previous three hundred years, civil wars--revolutions, secessionist wars, and anticolonial revolts-became the most frequent and deadly forms of armed conflict in the post- World War II era. The Correlates of War data indicate that between 1945 and 1999 there were only twenty-five interstate wars (resulting in a total of 3.3 million battle deaths), but five times as many civil wars (127) occurred, resulting in five times as many battle deaths (16.2 million) (Fearon and Laitin 2003:75). Second, whereas the major powers (including Europe, the United States, China, and Japan) had been the site of most of the world's interstate wars, the Third World-Asia, Africa, and Latin America-became the locus of almost all the armed conflict that punctuated the history of the last half-century. While Europe enjoyed what John Gaddis (1986) termed the "long peace" (the longest period in the post-Westphalia era without a major war among the major powers), conflicts in the Third World inflicted all but 176,000 of the 22 million battle deaths that occurred between 1945 and 1989 (Holsti 1992:37).

If the restructuring of the international system that occurred in the aftermath of World War II could result in such a profound transformation in the global patterns of armed conflict, we might also expect a similar shift to occur with the end of the Cold War. In this article I will explore the question of what trends, if any, we might expect to see in patterns of civil war in the new century. Will the end of the Cold War bring an end to the age of civil war or simply result in the diffusion of such conflict to regions that heretofore were relatively immune to its occurrence?

Investigating the prospects for another phase shift in global patterns of armed conflict requires that we relax the disciplinary boundaries between comparative politics and international relations. Changes in the structure of the international system have been implicated in the diffusion of revolutionary violence that occurred after World War II.1 The domestic conditions that most theories propose as causal antecedents of civil war-for example, extreme inequality of income and wealth, displacement of rural populations from the land, weak state capacity with repressive regimes-are, to varying degrees, outcomes of international processes, including the dismantling of colonial empires, the shift to export agriculture in many parts of the Third World, and the intervention of major powers in the domestic politics of Third World regimes in the service of Cold War geopolitical interests.

Three trends in the post-Cold War international system have been identified as possibly (but not certainly) moderating the domestic conditions that fuel civil

'See, for instance, Wolf (1969), Paige (1975), Walton (1984), and Mason (forthcoming).

(0 2003 International Studies Review. Publishedby Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.


20 Globalization, Democratization, and the Prospects for Civil War

war: (1) the globalization of national economies; (2) the third wave of democratization; and (3) the expanded use of peacekeeping operations as a means to bring civil wars to a peaceful conclusion. Globalization promises to bring new investments to Third World nations, diversifying their economies, stimulating growth, and potentially alleviating the deprivation that has fueled support for revolutionary insurgencies. The spread of democracy means that Third World states faced with opposition challenges will be far less likely to respond with the level of repression that has often turned peaceful opposition into revolutionary movements. And the expanded use of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations suggests that, when civil wars do occur, the international community is more likely to intervene to bring the war to an earlier and less destructive end. In the remainder of this article, I will examine the competing arguments on how these three trends might affect the frequency, destructiveness, and geographic distribution of civil wars in the new millennium.

Globalization and Revolution The end of the Cold War has accelerated the trend toward integration of national economies into a truly global economy. The dismantling of the economic wall between the market economies of the capitalist West and the state socialist economies of the Leninist East has encouraged the globalization of industrial production and finance to the Third World as well. This phenomenon is expected to alter the dynamics of national economic development in fundamental ways. The question for this article is whether these trends can create enough opportunity for enough of the population in the Third World to diminish the frequency of civil wars there.

Optimists predict that globalization will result in higher rates of investment and economic growth in the Third World as

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